Plants could be a renewable and biodegradable alternative to the polymers currently used in 3-D printing materials, researchers have found. A new paper, published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies, found that cellulose might become an abundant material to print with.

"These are the best Earth-sized planets for the James Webb Space Telescope to characterize, perhaps for its whole lifetime," Hannah Wakeford, postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said.

Big muscles in the tails of early dinosaurs helped them move about on all fours and rise up on just their two back feet, new research suggests. Bipedalism in dinosaurs was inherited from ancient and much smaller proto-dinosaurs.

Observations with Hubble are helping astronomers to understand the mass of UGC 12591, and to determine whether the galaxy simply formed and grew slowly over time, or whether it might have grown unusually massive by colliding and merging with another large galaxy at some point in its past, NASA said.

NASA scientists have demonstrated that a new space weather warning system could help astronomers detect harmful solar particles much before they leave the sun's inner atmosphere -- critical extra time that could help protect astronauts in space.

Days after the US President Donald Trump promised to "unlock the mysteries of space", NASA has kicked off a study to assess the feasibility of adding a two-member crew to the first unmanned flight of the agency's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft called Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).